Every Hurt Is a Lesson
by littlemissdelirious
Summary: "Sansa clings to songs, but Arya puts her faith in stories, and she can't shake the feeling that she is the sum of her heroes, destined for something greater than a ballad that floats idly through inattentive ears at the end of a feast." A character study of Arya Stark, the Hero of Winterfell. [Oneshot, Canon Compliant]


For years, Arya is convinced that her father is the greatest swordsman alive.

She drags Jon into the dustiest corners of the castle and packs herself into the remotest nooks and she makes him tell her the story over and over, of the seven northmen who went south to rescue Lyanna Stark, of the two who came home and all the dead legends in their midst. She's tried asking Father directly and she's tried discretely fishing, but he'll never supply the details – _it's not a story for little girls_, he says – so she collects scraps of information and stitches up the holes herself and the result is the notion of a man who must be stronger than any king and nobler than any knight.

Even as Arya discovers more of the world and begins to grow out of thinking that her father is invincible, she doesn't truly let herself grow out of it. He is called to the Iron Islands to quell the Greyjoy rebellion, to fight alongside King Robert, and she stands as tall as she can in the courtyard and hugs him tight and murmurs her farewell and, though the sadness goes deeper than any she's ever felt, it does not occur to her that his life is in danger.

"Will you take me to the sea one day?" she asks forlornly, thinking only of the time that sprawls endlessly ahead and the sights he will see without her. She looks into his solemn face and promises that she will behave, that she will take care of Mother and Sansa and Bran, though he's just a dumb baby who doesn't do much, and then the party of soldiers crosses through the gate and she races up the nearest tower, staring until the riders are tiny specks sailing towards the horizon.

For all Arya knows, the weeks that drift by are decades, and she spends a fair chunk of them squinting into the sunlit sky, perking up with each raven that swoops through Maester Luwin's window, her heart drumming against her ribs in anticipation of the scroll that confirms the end of the war. Jon knows lots of things about lots of things, but Father knows everything about everything, and in his absence Arya learns what it truly means to miss someone. She attempts to trail Mother around Winterfell, but too often that entails trailing Sansa, who only deigns to acknowledge her when the situation calls for a quietly hissed _shut up_, and Robb is always quick to steal Jon away, running off for hours to practice sparring.

In the end, Arya slinks around the godswood, and that's where she waits when Father finally returns, despite Mother's warnings not to pester him, because she knows in her heart that he won't send her away. Father, after all, is the only person who isn't routinely exasperated with her.

There are new scars, of course, but Father won't discuss any of them, though Jory talks amply about his at the feast, entertaining Robb with loud tales of glinting swords and gore and lost limbs that Mother would be sure to interrupt if she could pay attention. But she is preoccupied with Father, who rolls his shoulders in discomfort and picks grimly at his food – he has complained about being old for as long as Arya can remember, but this is the closest she's ever seen him to looking it – and a conversation passes between them that is entirely glances and nods, and shortly thereafter Father disappears from the table, retreating once more to the godswood.

Arya would like to join him, to regale him with all the stray thoughts and questions that she's carefully preserved in her mind since he left, especially when the residual lords prove slow to clear out of Winterfell and their presence loses its novelty, but instead she is washed and coiffed and dragged into winter town with Mother and Sansa, tending to the hollow-eyed widows and their grubby children, dolling out silver coins and baskets of bread and empty praise for the fallen.

She plods after her family, tripping over her skirts, hair pulled back so tight that her head aches, and she remains quiet as Sansa greets the people, because she is confused, unable to find it within herself to feel sorry for them. To Arya, it seems like the way of things that some men come back and some don't – her father, after all, carried Robert's rebellion and defeated Ser Arthur Dayne and knows more about fighting and commanding than anyone – and so she does not see the need for hollow pity.

Sansa scowls when Arya asks her and hisses, as if it is all very obvious, "Their fathers didn't come back."

"I _know _that," Arya says. "But it's not our fault they didn't fight hard enough."

"That's not how it works, you idiot," Sansa says, reprising the sad but perfect smile that she's worn since they set foot on the road, leaving Arya to bristle and glare and wonder what 'it' is.

When the worst of Father's wounds heal and the invisible ones go along with them, Arya walks through winter town with him instead, and the visits become far more enjoyable. She scrambles after him, five steps for every one of his, chattering happily about the things she's learned from Maester Luwin and Old Nan and the tomes she hauls down from the highest shelves in the library: Nymeria and Visenya and Rhaenys and Elissa Farman – all the figures woven into her dreams, their stories rife with courage and resolve and adventure, and not a single stupid lady with a single stupid favour.

(This is the difference between the Stark sisters – at least as far as Arya can see: Sansa clings to songs, but Arya puts her faith in stories, and she can't shake the feeling that she is the sum of her heroes, destined for something much greater than a ballad that floats idly through inattentive ears at the end of a feast.)

The legends always feel truer after she's relayed them to Father, even when it occurs to her that they are hardly recent developments. He imbues them with an extra layer of import and gravity, as though the fact of his interest and the care in his reactions make them worth being impressed by. She studies him closely and listens as well as she can and doesn't always understand the lessons that ensue, or the lessons that find her when he doesn't intend them to, but they ring through her head anyway, as with the one she ponders for days after Father takes Jon and Robb and Theon to the beheading of a Night's Watch deserter. Jon repeats it again and again, and Arya doesn't know why, but the words sink straight to her core, resonating so deeply that she wishes they could've been spoken to her by Father.

Afterwards, she comes upon him in the godswood, stolid and unchanging as the weirwood tree he sits under, and she straightens her spine and prepares to make her case, for she is nearly as old as Jon was when Father first allowed him at a beheading. She approaches with careful steps and perches on a log, trying to concentrate on the rustle of leaves, on the sunlight that ripples through them, but she can't. The godswood is detached and ancient and serene, as always, and, as always, it is not remotely reflective of Arya, who has a hundred thoughts bouncing between her temples at any given moment. She squishes handfuls of mud and snow in her palms, picks apart leaves, wrestles with her own mind, but ultimately proclaims her impatience with a sigh.

"I wouldn't look away," she says. "I'm _brave_."

Father studies her, creases forming at the corners of his eyes, and then his face breaks into a gentle smile, and she reassures herself that she _would _be brave, for him, like him, because he doesn't look at her with scorn or bewilderment or disapproval, because he doesn't mind that she's different, and that seems a thing worth emulating. It doesn't matter to him that her hair is a wild nest of knots, or that her nails are dirty even when she scrubs them, or that she lives on the brink of doing something wrong, whether it be rude or disobedient or unladylike. Even at her worst, he looks at her like she's Arya, just Arya, like that makes him proud – and that's precisely what he does now.

She imprints that smile in her mind and smiles back and vows silently that she'll think of him every time she holds a sword.

**.**

"First lesson," Jon says, grasping her shoulder, "…stick 'em with the pointy end."

**.**

"Boy? Girl?" Syrio chides, rounding on her after she protests. His face creases with disdain. "_You_ are a sword. That is all."

He adjusts her stance and her grip once more, but the sparring sword is too heavy, and Arya holds it at an awkward angle, feeling the weight drag at her arm and the prickle of the notion that she is in over her head. As soon as Syrio turns, she instinctively tightens her grasp, hands clenching around the rough wooden pommel, and he is not more than a few seconds in catching her out. "You are not holding a _battle axe_," he scolds, clicking his tongue. "You are holding—"

"A needle," she supplies, lighting up and earning a _just so_, and her dancing lessons begin.

She learns nothing about Syrio, or what it means to be First Sword of Braavos, but she absorbs his peculiar language of swords and steps, and that is all she needs. She can be swift and subtle. She can try. _Quiet as a shadow_, she tells herself. _Quick as a snake. _She chases cats and balances on one foot and she builds up her strength, her stamina, her awareness, until she can catch the sword with ease and hold her own through a spar.

Arya practices daily and, even afterwards, she speaks only of her training. _Syrio says, Syrio says, Syrio says_, she hears her own shrill voice repeating, but for once she is not ashamed of it. The words gush out of her and they feel right, just as the splotchy bruises and the soreness thrumming along her limbs feel right. The sewing, the embroidery, the hymns, the score of dumb things she had to fail at under the stern eyes of Septa Mordane – they're hours and hours of wasted time in comparison. They're not her.

Because she doesn't want the trappings of a lady; the dresses and the fawning circle of handmaidens and the marriage to some boring lord in some boring keep with a boring drove of sons, and she does not understand why people are so determined to convince her otherwise. _You'll think differently when you're older, _they say. But she won't. _This_ is what she pours herself into; this is what her contribution will be. She'll train and she'll fight and she'll put herself between the Lannisters and her father – and between the Lannisters and Sansa, she supposes – because she listens to Father and the people who visit him, to the whispers in the corridors, to the strange fat man she spies on amidst the dragon skulls, and it becomes clearer and clearer that it is coming to war.

"If you are with your trouble when fighting happens," Syrio says, "more trouble for you."

Father is attacked in the streets and, though Arya is thrown off, Syrio takes her by the scruff and drags her back to a place where she can redouble her focus. Even still, she can't help but dwell on Bran and Mycah and Nymeria and Jory, and always she thinks of Father, lying feverish and deadly still in bed, then limping through the solar, each footfall contorting his face into a reluctant wince. She lies awake at night and wonders if anyone has ever lost so much in so little time and how they endured the fallout, because she cannot comprehend it. Every farewell she's spoken has sheltered the implicit promise of a reunion, but now she realizes that it isn't so, that she can lose things for good, and it's as though the fear has opened up a rift below her feet and left her scrambling for purchase.

She fumbles her steps, her concentration wavers, and Syrio reminds her again that she is merely a sword, prodding her until she lets out a defiant growl and lunges and he seizes her anger, converts it into movement, into strength, and teaches her to be steady.

"There is only one god," he says, "and his name is Death."

Then it gets worse. They are confronted by a Kingsguard with four Lannister soldiers at his back, caught in a corner with wooden swords, and Syrio calmly raises his as he bids Arya to run. Her face falls and tears prick her eyes and she begs him to come with her, because he's taught her more than she can fathom, because she does not want to go alone, but still she listens to him and backs away.

She has to run this time – she has no chance against a grown man in armour – but she swears to herself that she won't run the next.

"What do we say to the god of death?"

**.**

"_Joffrey_," she whispers into the night. "_Cersei. Ilyn Payne. Ser Meryn. The Hound._"

**.**

"Someday," she says levelly, before she twists back towards the Twins, "I'm going to put a sword through your eye and out the back of your skull."

The Hound regards her for a moment, then snorts and shrugs it off, returning to the greasy hunk of pig meat that he's plucked from the stolen cart. Arya hears the wet smacking sounds of chewing and the scraping of teeth against bone and she hates him, she hates him, she hates him. She hated him when he sunk a sword into Beric Dondarrion and she hated him after, when he clamped a grubby hand over her mouth and took her captive, and she'll go on hating him until she's made good on her promise. But for now he reads her fear and she recalls his, thrusting it at him like a weapon, and they trudge on in a simmering silence, step by arduous step towards the looming stronghold of House Frey, where Arya sees the Stark banner and the northern soldiers, sees Grey Wind, and then sees red, red, red.

_I could have saved them_, she thinks dully, when she recovers the ability to think at all. _I could have tried_.

Everything seems infinitesimal in the wake of it – she stares deep into herself with her own listless eyes and tries to fathom the blur of raging fire and spurting blood and ruptured hope and she can't. There is only the fat hole in her heart that pieces of her are falling into faster than she can replace them.

Arya listens to the clip-clop of the horse's hooves and feels the cold caress of rainfall on her skin and it all thuds off her, as if she is hollow, and maybe she is, because her best memories of Mother and Robb get locked away somewhere too far and too painful to reach and she's lost the will to strain for them. She draws consolation from her list instead, for it is the one thought that isn't swallowed by the abyss she drags along with her.

The Hound's grumbled slew of complaints are also clumps of nothing, pooling in one ear and draining out the other and earning no response, though he doesn't appear bothered by this, and they ride on together – she doesn't know where to and doesn't care why – until they encounter a small camp of Frey soldiers. It starts as a knot of male voices in the distance and gradually untangles into distinct words, and these are the first that Arya finds herself able to comprehend in the eternity that has passed since the world split under her feet and took her family with it.

She fists a knife in one hand and Jaqen's coin in the other, offering the latter to the boasting soldier before she unclenches her fingers and offers him the former, driving it as hard as she can into his back, then wrenching it free and embedding it in again, to the hilt, over and over. His flesh tears and caves around the blade easier than she ever thought it could.

The Hound swoops in and shoves her aside, taking out the other soldiers, putting his sword through all three with near-effortless swings. Arya stays crumpled on the ground until they are disposed of and then she rises and observes the carnage.

"Is that the first man you've killed?" the Hound asks, standing over her.

"The first man," she says.

The dead soldier rests on his side, his upturned features masked by spreading rivulets of blood. It leaks out of the constellation of wounds across his back and shoulders, over the planes of his face, and seeps slowly into the dirt. It is all red, red, red.

Arya watches.

Trouble doesn't strike again until they near an inn that abounds with Lannister men. Hunger prods Arya's belly from the inside, growing more insistent with each hour, and a different sort pushes at the back of her mind, coming to a head when she recognizes Needle, then Polliver, and memories of Harrenhal surge up like bile. She vows to herself that he will die, realizing all the while that she might too – though having the Hound at her back will certainly prove an advantage – and that it is all the same to her, a chance she can't ignore.

_Valar morghulis_, she thinks, charging towards the door.

"You lived your life for the king," Polliver says, when they are seated. "You going to die for some chickens?"

"Someone is," the Hound says, and Arya can hardly suppress a smirk as the sneer across Polliver's squat face flattens into dismay. For the first time since fleeing the Brotherhood, she feels that she is in the right company.

The Hound overturns the table, incapacitating Polliver, and rushes at the others. Arya waits, taking in the merciless bite of his sword, marvelling over the way the men's bodies seem to freeze in mid-air before they collapse, their faces slack with horror. She'll never have the brute force to fight like that, but she can learn to spot weakness, she can create opportunities, she can be ruthless, and she feels it all well in the pit of her stomach as her greedy eyes dart between the Hound and the men who cross him, their blood soaking into the floorboards, wet and rich and darkly red.

Swordplay was Syrio's art; killing is the Hound's – and his is effective work.

Arya's mind races and it doesn't as she seizes one of the discarded swords and puts it through a man whose back is turned to her, finding, once again, that it is surprisingly simple. She helps whittle the group down to Polliver, his legs slashed, his breath guttering, and she stoops over him as she lowers Needle and delicately slips the point through his throat, watching the blood bubble out and choke him.

"Something wrong with your leg, boy?" she asks, and she can hardly remember what Lommy looked like, but that scene, those words, cling to her and rush in as easily as air.

Afterward, there is only silence and still bodies and the Hound rending a chicken leg from a half-eaten carcass, and something proud and placid courses through Arya as she wipes Needle clean and surveys the gory results of their toil.

"Hate's as good a thing as any to keep a person going," the Hound tells her. "Better than most."

Arya learns.

The Riverlands are swathes of blackened nothing, charred huts and smoking ruins, strewn corpses and ransacked carts, and Arya thinks of the tales Mother used to tell about her first home, lush and green and teeming with flowers and birds and rolling hills bathed in sunlight, and she compares those tapestries of life and colour to the sprawling fog that won't let up. Arya tries to suck it all in and expel her sadness along with it, breath by breath, refining the anger that remains into a single-minded stability, stringing a number of rickety slats across that secret abyss inside her and crossing it, step by step.

She dwells on her list more often than she dwells on her family now, and she intends to keep it that way, for she intends to keep moving. Nothing she can do will bring her mother back, but she can study death and serve it to House Frey; she can watch their bodies go limp and the souls drain out of their eyes and put an entire host of disturbed northern ghosts to rest.

The Hound finds this amusing. "The list of doomed men," he calls it. He trudges around like he has armour welded to his bones instead of skin and he scorns her water-dancing, her refusal to hurt innocent people, telling her that she doesn't know anything about the world, about how it works. But sometimes she'll nudge him a certain way and see a glimmer of something else, just as she once saw the reflection of fire and a glimmer of fear, though it never lasts long before he delivers her some new wrong to hate him for. He stomps all over good people, almost as often as he puts his sword through bad ones, and in those moments Arya is reminded of Mycah, split down the middle and slung dead over a horse.

It makes her wonder if she's betraying her friend, but she doesn't have a choice – at least this is what she tells herself – so she quashes the guilt and scrambles on after the Hound, five steps for every one of his, pressing him with questions, scolding him as needed, and she hates him, she hates him, she doesn't.

Weeks upon weeks of travel and they finally arrive at the Bloody Gate, only to be told that the woman they're seeking has been dead for all of three days. Arya hears this and keels over laughing, because _of course_, and all the while she basks in all the relief there is to be gleaned from not being pawned off on some pathetic shadow of her mother in some pathetic shadow of Winterfell. She's comfortable as she is, on the edge of discomfort, sleeping in the open and foraging and practicing with Needle – it's almost like belonging somewhere, though she supposes it's more like belonging nowhere.

And so they retrace their path through the craggy trench, stopping to camp where the mountains taper into hills, and Arya perches herself on a rock, speculating. She has no family left, immediate or otherwise, and she's not clear which way they're heading, or why. There's no gold in it, after all, no ransom to collect, but the Hound hasn't yet left her to rot in the heart of a landscape that is likely depicted as a hundred identical markings on the maps. He means to continue on, and she wonders if she can convince him to take her to Essos – assuming he'll recover from the wound that festers on his neck and make it that far.

"No reward's worth this much trouble," he says, gruff but unmeaning, wincing as he paws at the putrefying flesh that's too red and too swollen and raw as ever. Arya's head snaps up and she stares, a strange heaviness amassing in her gut as her eyes slide over the oozing expanse of skin, the scabs that don't heal. She doesn't know much about cures, but she witnessed various attempts at Harrenhal and with the Brotherhood, and she thinks she can manage it, so she thrusts a stick into the fire and offers to burn away the worst bits, only to recoil as he roars at her.

A tense silence follows and Arya stews, halfway annoyed and halfway amused that a man who can kill a dozen people in the span of a few lunges is terrified of something as innocuous as a flicker of heat, and over an incident that took place so long ago. She retreats and waits, expecting nothing, but then the Hound's scowl relaxes into something more vacant and he begins to mutter through his version of events and, for some reason, she listens raptly.

"The pain was bad," he says, gesturing to the ravaged half of his face, "the smell was worse. But the worst thing was that it was my brother who did it…and my father who protected him."

Arya's heard the story before, but this time a strange sinking feeling takes over. She remembers when she and Sansa argued, all those petty words that were like tiny cuts that never stopped stinging, and she thinks of all the gashes she's accumulated since leaving Winterfell, barely sewn up with promises of vengeance, and she imagines living with both her whole life, with no traces of Father and Mother and her siblings and Syrio echoing through her mind.

And yet, deeper still, she imagines someone snatching her heart from her chest and scorching it until every good thing melted away and she was left with only hatred and scars and heaps and heaps of nothing and it doesn't seem so far off from what's happened.

"You think you're on your own," the Hound says.

Arya offers to wash it out, to sew it up, and he lets her, so she bends over the wound and sloshes wine and she feels heavy with pity, heavy with dread, and yet strangely prepared, because she knows she'll have to flee. He won't make it to Essos; he might not even make it out of the Vale. And part of her does not want him to – if he wracks his brain and thinks up another distant family member to sell her to, she'll pass from captor to captor and never be free.

She'll need a horse. She'll need gold. She'll need passage east. She'll need to make her escape, even if she doesn't particularly want to, even if her feet feel stuck to the ground, for this is one of those rare moments when it's not Mycah's killer towering over her. She stands behind him and threads the stitches through the tender flesh and sees only the bowed head and slumped shoulders of a broken man – the same broken man she'll see when the lady knight is finished with him.

As soon as their swords rasp out of their sheaths and it comes to blows, Arya disappears into the bluffs, sequestering herself until the brutal echoes of grunting and shouting and clashing steel die and she scuttles out to face the Hound, to watch his features contort as he struggles to writhe in pain. There is a chunk missing from his thigh and useless flaps where his ear was and not a visible patch of skin that isn't red and sticky with blood.

Arya kneels and stares, absorbing all of it, wondering why it doesn't make her feel half as overjoyed as she spent night after night imagining it would – a name off her list, and the first man who ever earned a place on it, no less. But it doesn't feel like justice; it doesn't feel like triumph. It feels like heaps and heaps of nothing.

"You remember where the heart is?" he asks, and she does, but she doesn't, because there is a vast empty space where hers used to be. She listens to his frantic attempts at provoking her into driving Needle through that languidly thing in his chest and she thinks. There is a part of her that knows he is not a good man who deserves good things, and another part that knows he doesn't rank anywhere near as bad as the likes of Tywin Lannister and Walder Frey, and another part, deeper down, that doesn't have the strength to care either way.

"Kill me," he says, and the command becomes a plea. "_Kill me_."

Arya leaves.

**_._**

_Valar morghulis_, she thinks, darting to the prow of the merchant's ship. _Valar morghulis, valar morghulis, valar morghulis._

**.**

After she is denied, Arya persists a day and a night on the desolate threshold of the temple. She hunches over the iron coin, spinning it again and again and again in her fingers, offering up her list like a prayer, and does not look up once. Rain descends in sheets and then abates, drenching her and inciting violent shivers that wrack her spine long after she is dry, and when the sun finally crests the horizon, she picks herself up and ventures out onto the teeming streets of the Free City of Braavos.

She wanders until she is sought by the priest and permitted entry, passing beneath the disapproving eyes of a hundred different gods, and shown to a tiny cell, where she is supplied a new dress and the broom that she will wrap her twitching hands around for weeks to come. The next day, on orders, she tosses Arya Stark's meagre collection of things – clothes she's scrounged and worn since Harrenhal, the coin that once belonged to someone who was Jaqen and wasn't, a pouch of gold stolen from a dying man – into the harbour without complaint, but reaches for Needle and blinks her eyes as they sting and swim with tears.

(Arya Stark decides to tuck the sword into a crevice between the rocks, where it will be safe, where it will keep vigil alongside all the memories that she can't bring herself to exorcise. No one has to know.)

Over the course of her training, she is lied to and beaten and belittled. She sweeps floors and tends to ashen corpses; she is given a mission and she holds to it – for a time. Then Meryn Trant's dour face breaks through a crowd and the thin man she is meant to be scrutinizing ceases to exist, for Arya feels her list prickling the back of her throat and the ghost of Syrio on her heels and she can't muster the will to deny it.

She corners _Meryn fucking Trant_ and rams a knife into him over and over, and it feeds the hunger that explodes in her gut after weeks and weeks of suppression. She relishes the feel of flesh parting under the blade and slick blood oozing through her fingers, then she thinks of Syrio proudly gripping half a wooden sparring sword and dislodges the knife and sinks it in again.

(She wonders what Syrio would think of her. What Father would think. It does not matter – they are not around to think.)

She is found out, of course, and the cycle begins again, only this time she is _blinded _and beaten and belittled. They turn her onto the streets, where she begs for coins, but not for release, though she can hear the desperate quaver that develops in her voice. _A girl has no name_, she thinks. _A girl has no list. _She endures day after day, test after test, and it takes more than she ever meant to give, but her reflexes sharpen and her steps grow surer and she almost believes that she is No One by the time she is allowed another chance – she slips a vial of poison into her pocket and readies herself to study an actress, and instead the actress studies her.

The play doesn't get better, though Arya attends it three times, working herself up to poisoning the woman whose performance convinces her, just for a moment, that Cersei Lannister has a story of her own, who stops Arya by the curtain and compliments her face and smiles with genuine affection. Arya pats the vial through a layer of wool and tries to ignore the reluctance tugging at the back of her mind, but it is not until she dribbles the deadly contents into a decanter of rum that the truth of it clarifies before her: there are still good people in the world, however few, and she has been tasked with killing one of them.

She makes it as far as the stage before she vaults back through the curtain and slaps the glass from Lady Crane's prim grip, knowing to her core that she's as right as she is wrong, that the choice will cost her dearly – and it does. Three stab wounds and a gruelling walk through half a dozen identical streets; a thousand indifferent eyes travelling over her; an ally who sews her up and makes her laugh and reminds her, fleetingly, of what it feels like to have a mother and then dies anyway.

When Arya hears the thud and comes upon Lady Crane draped brokenly over a toppled stool, she has no time to think before she is leading the Waif on a wild chase through the market, legs pumping hard beneath her, instinct taking charge as scraps of memory forge themselves into a plan that backs them into the corner of her choosing, where she lowers her eyelids and exhales and an odd calm flows through her.

The Waif advances. There is only a guttering candle and Needle in her hand.

She is Lana. She is Mercy. She is No One.

She is Arya Stark of Winterfell, and she is going home.

**.**

The crypt is perfectly still, stagnant air, silent ghosts, and they stand before a statue that is meant to resemble their father – _it doesn't look like him_, Arya thinks over and over, picturing kind grey eyes and a smile that wasn't as rare as he intended it to be – and then Sansa interrupts, asking, "How did you get back to Winterfell?"

"It's a long story," Arya replies, turning toward her sister, searching. "I imagine yours is, too."

Sansa doesn't hesitate. "Yes," she says, "and not a very pleasant one."

"Mine neither," Arya says.

And then, as an afterthought, she adds, "But our stories aren't over yet."

**.**

Arya spends her days roaming the dark, narrow corridors of Winterfell, skirting the stares of strangers and grazing her palms over the smooth stone walls that she once equated with home. She waits for Jon and tries to decipher Bran and watches her sister closely, but not so closely that her sister catches on.

Sansa has adjusted well to her court of the fickle and the false, it's clear, packing Winterfell with schemers and sycophants, all the sorts that Father reviled, making a show of poring over ledgers and issuing orders and conferring with the lords of the North and the Vale. Arya, meanwhile, turns corners and hurtles headlong into memories, only to blink and realize that the people she sees in the flesh do not line up with the silhouettes she's conjured in her mind: it is not Maester Luwin in the library or Jory at the gate or Hodor in the stables; it is not Mother in the solar or Father in the godswood. The only familiar faces that Arya ever comes across, it seems, are the ones she stows in the pouch under her bed.

She has been on guard too long; she's had the right to be – the scars that score her side still prickle and ache when she dwells on them – and now she can't even stand to put family between herself and the habit. She wakes in fits and starts, jolted upright, and braces to meet the looming shadows over her shoulder. _There's no safety_, she thinks, and then Bran presents her with a dagger and she fixes on the threat that she's been scouting for, the plots binding her in like webs. She skulks after Littlefinger, watching him whisper in Sansa's ear, watching Sansa listen. And then she discovers an old scroll tucked under his mattress, rolled up tight and bearing the words of what would appear to be a traitor.

_My beloved Joffrey_, she reads, in Sansa's pretty handwriting, and a fire ignites in her. She pictures Sansa as she must have been, a weak little girl with the queen stooping over her, the same weak little girl who stood with the Lannisters as the sword came down, and she can't summon any sympathy with which to colour the scene.

"While you were off _training_, I suffered things you can never imagine," Sansa sneers when Arya confronts her, and it makes it all so much worse. "You never would have survived what I survived."

Arya bristles, even as part of her concedes, and then she reins it in and prods further, feeling for the gaps in Sansa's cool demeanour. At the mention of the northern lords, a furrow emerges between Sansa's brows and her lips press into a tight frown. Arya takes note of it and crunches the letter in her palm, recalling all the cruel things that Sansa once said to her, the haughty looks and the laughter, all the squabbles they should resent each other for, and still she is aware somewhere in the depths of her mind that making her sister squirm does not bring her any satisfaction.

"Do you know how happy Cersei would be right now if she saw us fighting?" Sansa tries. "This is exactly what she wants, what she's always wanted – to tear us apart."

At first, Arya does not internalize these words – she is locked into her resolve, desperate to pinpoint all the reasons that home doesn't feel like home, reasons outside herself, and Sansa proves an uncomplicated target. Arya dredges up worn grudges and continues to haunt the halls, Needle on one hip, the dagger on the other, the scroll in her pocket, and takes to sifting through her collection of faces as she ponders her next move, but they offer her no real semblance of peace.

(She could be any of a dozen people at any given moment; she could pull their skin over hers and walk in their shoes – why, then, is it so difficult to be Arya Stark again?)

Eventually, adrift and restive, she wanders to the godswood.

Shadows sprawl across the glistening snow and the red leaves of the weirwood rustle under each caress of the wind and, though she serves a different god now, Arya feels she can almost commune with her parents amid its gnarled roots. She closes her palm over Needle, then slides out the dagger instead, threading it through nimble fingers, examining the formidable edge of the blade and trying to envision her mother's hands closing around it as she fought for Bran's life. She wouldn't have believed Mother capable of that back then – _ladies don't fight_, Septa Mordane always said – but now, squinting down the impossible lengths that Mother and Father went to protecting them, she decides she should've.

(Arya glanced out her window earlier and was nearly convinced she saw Mother in the courtyard – auburn hair catching the sunlight, purposeful strides. It turned out to be Sansa crossing to the rookery.)

She will never forget how terrified she was, perched on that bare hill overlooking the Twins, so close and so far and so utterly certain that her mother would peer right through her, see what she'd done, and choose not to take her back. _I only did those things to survive_, Arya was prepared to beg, _I wanted to get home_, and now she realizes with a start that Sansa's story is much the same. Reaching into her cloak, she retrieves the scroll and runs her thumb over the hollow assurances, watching the bent corners flutter as the wind sweeps past. She skims the message and, upon repeating it, discovers that she is sad and fiercely proud and alight with a different anger – one that is not directed at her sister.

_We cannot fight a war amongst ourselves, _she thinks.

It's not simple. It's never simple. Arya can't fathom the wars that Sansa has weathered since they were separated, nor does she know what memories flash behind Sansa's eyes, but she understands that there were wars, that there are memories. And it's Sansa's strength as much as it was once her fault – courtesies and embellishments and intuiting the lies that people want to hear. She must have gathered it all around her and fashioned it into a sword and a suit of armour in order to endure the capital, to endure the people who forced these false words through her pen, and the process was surely no less tolling than the effort demanded by Arya's own repertoire.

"I've killed more people than I can count – people who've hurt me, people who've hurt our family," she says, meeting Sansa in the chambers that once belonged to their parents, twirling the dagger in her hands, "and I'm prepared to kill another."

"Is this a threat?" Sansa asks, unflinching.

Arya advances forward, studying the blade once more, flipping it once more, and then she extends the hilt to her sister. "The choice is yours."

**.**

Arya tugs a shard of obsidian from her belt, her senses straining as the battle rumbles closer, and she pushes it into her sister's hands. Sansa gapes at the knife, paling. "I don't know how to use it," she says.

"Stick 'em with the pointy end," Arya tells her.

**.**

The fallen have been burned, thousands of corpses reduced to wind-swept ash, the haze that remains of them billowing upward and enclosing the towers of Winterfell, thick and dark and menacing, and now the grounds ring with the chanting and cheering of those who believe they've evaded death. Arya finds a quiet corner and a pot of arrows and, despite the soreness in her arms and the lingering cold that slid through her veins so quick she felt splintered, the sensation that her flesh would cloud over and burst like glass, she plants her feet and hefts the bow and takes aim. _The hero of Winterfell_, they're calling her. It echoes through her ears and the outer corridors of her mind and doesn't make it any further than that – not to a spot where she can revel in it, at any rate. Her reserves are depleted.

_The war is never over_, she thinks.

It was like nothing she could have imagined: a stifling blur of desperation and luck and instinct, her head cracking against stone, her heart like a battering ram against her ribs, ravaged human faces and groping skeletal hands, meeting the blue eyes of Death and driving a blade into its heart. Afterward, she set the dagger on a table in her chambers and peeled off her clothes, drenched with spattered guts and sweat and snow, blood seeping down her temple, livid scars, and she faced herself in the looking glass. She realized that her name was indelibly etched into history, that she'd become one of the legends she'd always looked up to, that it didn't matter to her – not then. There was only the dizziness that shrouded her vision and the remnants of sour fear in her mouth and a deep-seated solitude, as though she was staring down the length of a winding road that she was meant to navigate alone.

The stories don't mention that part; they don't mention the after – the heaps of bodies and the lassitude that weighs on each step and the deafening chorus of _what now, what now, what now _in the dead of night.

Arya nocks another arrow and looses it. She watches it sail toward the target and thud into the centre and then she listens to Gendry approach, just as she'll listen to him leave. "That's not me," she tells him, but she does not tell him that she decides to embark the moment he makes his proposal. Visenya Targaryen, after all, did not conquer Westeros and cease to exist, and Arya wants nothing less than to retreat into obscurity and resign herself to being a finished tale in someone else's future, firing arrows at a blank target on a blank wall while the world continues on. The claim spreading through Winterfell is that she defeated death, but it's the realest thing she knows, the only thing that distracts from the gaps in her heart that once housed the living, and there is still a name calling her.

A few days later, she saddles a horse and spurs it onto the Kingsroad.

She travels alongside the Hound, communicating primarily through grunts and grimaces, murmuring her goal aloud to herself – _you're going to kill the bloody queen_, he barks, _I heard you the first time _– and then they reach King's Landing and she is plunged into a hell like she's never known. The bells sound the city's surrender, and Daenerys Targaryen takes flight. Her dragon screeches and swoops low and the capital is engulfed in stream upon stream of flame.

The Hound carves a path through the throng of frantic smallfolk, those desperate to get within the bounds of the Red Keep, then out of them, and Arya glances back across the shrieking mass before she trails him inside. She ascends the steps and it all floods in – Bran's fall, Lady and Nymeria, her father's execution and the vicious family that oversaw it – and she doesn't notice the chunk of stone that dislodges itself from the ceiling until the Hound throws her aside. They advance further and Arya feels it all before she's close, the fear in Cersei Lannister's green eyes, the blood spilling over her hands, and then an arch crumbles and a toppling column shakes the ground beneath their feet and the Hound turns and blocks her way.

"I'm going to kill her," she says, storming past, but the Hound catches her arm and spouts words that she doesn't heed and then gets a hand around her neck, forcing her head upward.

"You come with me, you die here," he says, in the kindest voice she's ever heard out of him, and it's a tense moment and another shower of rubble before it dawns on Arya that he is protecting her one final time. She stares at the marred half of his face, the earnest look in his eyes, and the hot anger in her chest cools into an inexplicable hurt that takes the span of his steps across the room to process. She thinks in flashes of the doomed queen in the tower and the collapsing ceilings above and Winterfell and all the vibrant reds and greens and blues of the world and suddenly she can channel the thirst for revenge, the willingness to die for it, and let it slip through the gaps in her fingers, if only because her companion will not get to.

"Thank you," she calls out, and Sandor nods. The rest is horror that Arya will never be able to capture in words.

She scrambles out of the shell of the keep, to the gates, and then she is lost. Lost in a crush of people. Lost in streets she doesn't remember. Lost amidst fire and stampeding horses and broken buildings. She sprints and ducks and panics; she seizes the sight of a familiar face and then that is lost too. She breathes hard, but she can't, and the flames sear close, closer, and it is almost a relief when she is struck by a collapsing tower, and then a shock when she comes to. Her eyes flutter open and she gasps, choking on the dust that coats the inside of her lungs, pawing at the blood and debris that cake her face, dried stiff, and then she peers down the road ahead. Before her is a white horse, a vision made real, a miracle, the only living thing she can make out for miles.

Arya inches toward the creature and reaches for the reins, crooning, and then she mounts it and digs her heels into its side, maintaining the gallop until she is well beyond the demolished border of the city and ravenously sucking in air that is free of ash.

For the first time in a long while, it occurs to her that she is alive.

**.**

_Not today, _she thinks, scouring away the grime that's crusted over her like a second skin. _Not today. Not today. Not today._

**_._**

It is shortly after Bran is named king, as she watches the sun rise and glide into position, that Arya decides she will sail west, and the first person she tells is her sister. She and Sansa settle into a secluded chamber in one of the reconstructed wings of the Red Keep and see to the arrangements together. They make sketches and track down shipwrights and search for a proper crew – Sansa _insists_ that they leave spots for half a dozen of her most trusted guards – and then Sansa arches over a ledger and teaches Arya all she can about leading, about managing gold, about provisions and planning for the worst, and Arya is once again astounded at how practical her sister has become. She pictures Sansa on a throne in the North, ruling, and the yawning pit that jealousy gouged into her heart all those years ago is packed tight and smoothed over with respect.

"Mother would be proud of you, Sansa," she says, "and Father, too."

Sansa frowns slightly, prettily, as she drips wax over a scroll, then she registers the words and glances up. It takes a moment, but her mouth softens and her eyes cloud with tears, her whole expression gaping open in a way that it hasn't of late, and she extends a hand so that she can clasp Arya's. "There will always be a place for you at Winterfell," she says solemnly.

"I know."

Before she departs, Arya studies Sansa, memorizing every detail she can, imprinting it all across the walls of her mind, and then she studies Bran, and then Jon. She decides that these are the faces she will carry with her from now on.

**.**

When they have passed out of the bay, Arya crosses to the prow of the ship and looks across the rippling expanse of water ahead, thinking on all that she is leaving in her midst – the ice and the ashes, the gods of the North and the gods of the east and the one god that mattered, the names and the scars and the stories.

She gathers them all and stows them in the safest place she can find and sails on into the next chapter of hers.


End file.
